The Weight of the Altar

Illustration by Gemini AI

Fiction

“Oh, God! I feel like a fraud.” Father Thomas complained to the crucifix behind the altar in the parish church. Jesus didn’t seem particularly concerned. Nothing changed in His weary face that lay inclined and dead on His right shoulder.

Father Thomas was nearing the age of fifty when he started feeling that his entire life as a priest amounted to nothing of any significance. Earlier, at least the church used to be full with the faithful on most days. Nowadays even Sundays didn’t draw more than a few score parishioners.

People are losing faith, Father Thomas lamented.

But soon he realised that that wasn’t his real problem. Was he losing faith himself? Had he become a ‘clerical machine’ as a retreat preacher phrased it recently? A mechanical performer of weddings, funerals, and the Mass. The prayers had become mere echoes in a cold stone building.

“My God! My God! Are you forsaking me?” He asked the crucified God. A fine, cold dew of exertion clung to his brow, as if the very weight of the silence in the spacious church were beginning to seep through his skin.

The parish bell peeled announcing the sunset as usual. It was an ancient practice to remind the parishioners that it was time for them to call it a day and to light lamps and recite the Angelus. Now no one cares anymore though the bell keeps tolling ritually. No one works in the fields or such places now. For such works, Kerala brings people from North India. Will they also lease out the task of reciting prayers to these Bhais, as they are called in the state?

Father Thomas was perturbed. His God had no answers for any of his worries. He looked at the crucified Jesus once more, felt pathetic for Him, crossed himself, and stood up. When he turned to leave the church, a figure on one of the back pews caught his eyes. It was a woman, he could easily make out though the church was dimly lit. Very strange.

The woman followed Father Thomas as he walked out of the church.

“I’m Elena,” she introduced herself. She had come home on holiday from London where she worked as a nurse. She visited the parish cemetery where her father lay buried. Before returning home she thought of praying in the church, her own parish church.

Elena was far more beautiful than any of the women in the parish, Father Thomas noticed. The sleeveless linen dress that caught the last of the amber light of the dying sun made her look dazzling. Father Thomas uttered a silent prayer to Jesus not to lead him into temptation, especially at this twilight hour.

“The bells,” she said. The sweetness of her voice rose over the sharp drone of the cicadas in the bushes. “Are they trying to wake the dead or the living?” She smiled. Wickedly, Father Thomas thought.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” He asked hinting that a woman like her shouldn’t be found alone with the parish priest at that time of the day. “Confession?” That’s what people usually came for at odd hours of the day.

She laughed lightly. “Oh, no. I confess directly to God. We have a good rapport, God and me.”

“That’s interesting,” Father Thomas was genuinely impressed and interested. “But it’s getting late. Why don’t you come tomorrow in the day so that we can discuss at length?”

Elena did meet Father Thomas the next day and they discussed many things like human frailties, sins, atonement, divine forgiveness… Something seemed to weigh heavily on Elena’s conscience. It took a few days of conversations, that touched mostly upon the theology of human weakness and divine forgiveness, before Elena confessed her multiple or countless sins of fornication.

“I’m not sorry really,” she said.  “I loved the man and wanted to marry him too. But we got tired of each other. Why should sex be sin? I don’t know.”

All the theology that Father Thomas had taught her in the past few days was of no use. Religion is like that, he thought. Mere rituals. Hollow words.

Elena left without being convinced in the least that sex outside marriage was sin.

She left Father Thomas shaken.

“If your God created man and woman, why doesn’t He let them love too?” Elena’s question lingered like a smouldering cinder in the priest’s shaken heart. Elena’s smile disturbed his sleeps. But, strangely, for the first time in years he felt alive. No, it’s not Elena that I want, he contemplated. I want the world she represents – the warmth, the touch, the love… the escape from this lonely silence.

Elena came to say good bye the next day. She was returning to London.

“You’ve been a good friend in this village,” she told him. “Thank you for the wonderful moments you shared with me.”

Father Thomas faltered. “I want to make a confession to you, Elena.”

Elena smiled as usual. She wasn’t surprised.

“I was agonisingly tempted by you,” the priest said. “You showed me how lonely a man I am. How feeble.”

His voice cracked. Elena felt sorry for him. She would have felt sorry for herself too had she not learnt to accept human frailties as inevitable.

“But I’m glad,” the priest said. “I’m glad you taught me the real meaning of spirituality. That it isn’t about being perfect, being an unfeeling vessel for the divine. I feel more deeply now. I can now understand the frailties of my parishioners with divine forgiveness.”

Father Thomas’s sermon on the next Sunday was on ‘The Shared Brokenness of Being Human.’